[Mirabel Anstalionah.]
I ran the reports until the pages blurred. Names, numbers, endless columns that my hands kept flipping through because my eyes refused to stop.
Each sheet felt heavier than the last, as if ink could be measured in guilt.
I didn't want to believe it. I needed it to be a nightmare.
I tore through the capital, wind clawing at my skirts, the streets dissolving into a smear of color.
When I reached the great church, it loomed like a wound: black obsidian, crowned with a golden idol that pointed its empty hand to the sky.
But inside, there was no light. No incense. No hymn. Only dust, shattered pews, and crosses snapped in two.
I slammed the ledger closed and swore. My fingers shook as I leafed through the final entry beneath Jennifer Howling.
Nicole Anstalionah.
The name sat on the page like a verdict.
People in the plaza watched me hold the paper. Their faces were hollow, confused, then the slow, spreading animal fear that comes when something ordered unravels.
Murmurs rose as Saint Satire passed through the front lines, then the church emptied."
The story unfolded outwards like a crack in glass.
We'd heard the reports in a dozen different ways over the last two weeks: worshippers vanishing mid-prayer; patrols returning to rows of empty helms where soldiers had stood.
Entire households woke as if someone had erased the people who lived in them.
Clocks hiccupped backward for one breath; memory frayed in others, mothers and fathers who remembered their children yesterday found no children today.
No one could say when the change began.
When Satire first stepped from the battlefield, the temples went still. Then, overnight, altars were abandoned.
Priests disappeared. Statues crumbled as though time itself declined to care.
From Uthopia to Bamdia, the same silence answered any plea. Kings convened emergency councils.
Borders held while rulers who had spent lifetimes clawing at each other agreed on one thing: the Golden Authority must be stopped.
Whoever controlled the church now commanded something far uglier than doctrine.
The ledger on my lap listed five thousand names from our regiments alone. Five thousand or more soldiers, clerics, and citizens vanished in the wake of the Saint's passage.
Rumors multiplied: mercy, erasure for blasphemy, folded souls rewritten into a liturgy no living mouth could sing. No explanation eased my chest.
I had been cautious. I had delayed inquiry behind the polite mask of prudence. I had hesitated to press Nicholas.
I had not forced open the cathedral doors. That hesitation cost us Nicole. It cost Jennifer. It cost thousands.
A special act followed the chaos.
Sovereigns and generals would meet in Anstalionah for what would have been our wedding, now repurposed as an alliance, a coalition of crowns sworn to end a power that had weaponized faith.
The vows would bind more than two houses that day; they would bind nations.
I had thought Nicholas had withdrawn because of grief, softened, hiding behind self-imposed exile.
In truth, what he had seen lay beyond Kivana's visions, beyond anything I'd imagined. Whatever confronted him was absolute and unforgivable.
It drew him away from sorrow into a resolve cut of ice.
I raced to the highlands estate, past guards, past bridges, past the city's last bright things, until the garden gate opened like a held breath.
He stood among white lilies and roses, backlit by morning, uncanny.
His hair was wild; his skin unmarked; he wore only torn white pants and the ancient sword at his back.
But it was his eyes that stole the air, blank, white, not pools of color but absence, moons where pupils should have been.
Sansir followed a step behind, solemn. Nicholas inhaled once; the faint scent of rot that clung to him faded.
He scanned the garden and said, slow and flat, "I can't feel her. Not anywhere."
If he could not sense his sister in all the world, then she might truly be gone. My throat tightened. "It's the Golden Authority," I whispered. "They betrayed us."
He closed his eyes. The line of his mouth set like metal. "So I was late." His laugh came, a small, terrible sound.
"Then prepare, Mirabel. Not just for our wedding… for the annihilation of every last follower of that false god."
I wrapped my arms around him because that day I needed to hold a man who had become something other than the boy I would marry.
"First," I murmured into his hair, "let's wash you up."
***
As I tended him, the memory of the Nicholas I knew pressed sharp as a blade.
He had been lazy in small, infuriating ways, an elegant indolence that hid behind charm.
He could be heartless when duty annoyed him: late for councils, distracted in crises, content to let others shoulder burdens while he lingered in secluded comforts.
I used to blame his youth; sometimes I suspected it was something deeper.
He had been brilliant and unbothered, a prince who avoided the hard edges of power.
Now that has changed, and changed utterly. The fissures that once mapped his body have closed; the flinches are gone.
The softness has been burned away and replaced with a kind of brightness that makes everything else look faded.
Where he once handled the rule like an ornament, he now carries it like a blade.
His presence narrows the world until all petty things, courts, gossip, and compromise seem pale and meaningless beside him.
The secluded training, the long nights of terrible focus, the choices he refused before, they've made him more than a man who commands armies.
He moves with a certainty that rewrites the room. Even victory tastes different when he is near.
He turned to me then, voice steady. "Can you imagine a world without death? Without hate? Without war?"
I did not answer; my hands kept washing, each movement a small absolution. He smiled, soft and brittle, older than his years.
"Maybe I got soft. Maybe I wanted rest." His fingers brushed my shoulder. "Do you think my sin is too dark? My little miracle?"
"We all sin," I said. "But you carried yours as if the world would end if you ever let it go."
He laughed again, a hollow sound, and for a terrifying moment, he looked like something forged rather than born: not merely the boy I had loved, but a presence with reach, with stakes.
He no longer fit into the small measures of our lives. He had become an ork of force: harsher, clearer, and more absolute.
He looked at me then with something like resolve. "It's time," he said. "I'll show the world who I am."
I felt it then, the difference between the man who once postponed burdens and the one who now wears destiny as easily as his skin.
The old Nicholas had been careless with hearts and with duty; the new one is terrible in his precision.
In the wash of steam and the smell of soap, I understood that the person before me had passed through something like a crucible.
The man who returned made everything else, offices, bargains, and gentle mercies, seem small.
And I, who have kept my own hunger under tight rein, could not deny the awe I felt: this change was better in the sense that it was complete.
Whether that completion would save us or destroy the world, I could not yet tell.
But I no longer doubted his power to make the world bow.